Blade Dance (A Cold Iron Novel Book 4) Read online

  “For some reason,” she said, “I didn’t think that the wall was a physical thing, a wall made out of bricks and mortar.”

  “It’s not,” said the Prince. “It’s a magical construct with physical foundations in both worlds.”

  “Finn says that you have been to the other side.”

  “Briefly,” said the Prince.

  “What was it like?”

  He turned to look at her and his eyes gave the impression of seeing her, really seeing her for the first time. “You are the first to ask,” said the Prince.

  “I have a hard time believing that.”

  “That’s because Berserkers are part Fae and part human. The human side of you is curious. The human side of you indulges in empathy. You wonder what it is like for the Court, exiled from the world they once ruled, imprisoned for two thousand years. You wonder this even though they ruled with consistent cruelty.”

  “I suppose I do wonder. I don’t want them back. But I’m not sure I want them to suffer eternally, either.”

  “That is your human side again.”

  “It must have been terrible there,” said Ann.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “Because you don’t want to tell me. When something is terrible enough, you don’t even want to think about it. You try to forget it. Talking about it just makes it real again.”

  “Did you read that in a glossy magazine at the supermarket checkout, Miss Phillips? Standing there with your basket of groceries after totaling up the bill and realizing you couldn’t afford to indulge in a gossip rag and eat meat that night? That’s when the rage inside you is hardest to control, isn’t it? It’s not when you watch some bully take a swing at his wife or child. It’s when you stand there at the supermarket checkout knowing that you are better than all the sheep in line in front of you. That you have the proud blood of ancient warriors in you. That you’re more than everyone else around you, but that by sheer force of numbers, with their craven rules and laws, they’ve made you small. That’s what it feels like on the other side of the wall. And that’s why I’m going to bring it down.”

  He was right. She had felt like that, but she didn’t like that about herself, and she didn’t like that he could see inside her like that. “Even though the Queen hates half-bloods, like your nephew?”

  “If the boy favors me, she’ll want him as a pet. And she’ll delight in your survival. She always loved berserkers. If Finn plays her correctly, she won’t come between you.”

  “He won’t let the wall come down.”

  “He won’t be able to stop it. He knows that. It is only a matter of time. The wall wasn’t built to stand forever. And if it has a weakness, it will be in these plans.”

  “Then you’ll have to study them later. We’re here for Davin and the Druid,” she reminded him.

  “So we are,” said the Prince. “These will keep. They’ve kept for two thousand years.”

  “You mean you’ll come back for them,” she said.

  “Of course. I will study them to find the fatal flaw in the design, and Miach will come here to search for some way to shore the wall up. The laws of nature and physics, though, favor me. Nothing lasts forever, not even the wall.”

  “If the end of the wall is inevitable, why work so hard to hasten its destruction? Why not wait for it to fall on its own. Do you love the Queen that much?”

  “I love her almost as much as I hate her,” mused the Prince, “but that isn’t why I’m impatient to have the wall down. I am heartsick of the human world, of your pale imitation of life. I miss the beauty of the Court. You could not even imagine it. Our architecture, our painting, our sculpture, our music, even our stories were more vibrant than anything humans have ever devised. I want to live again, truly live, as the Fae lived before the fall. You would want that, too, if you knew what it was like. And you can know. Let me show you.”

  He took a step toward her. She backed away.

  “We’re here for Davin,” she said.

  “And he is here because the Druid found these. It will take but a moment to show you what it is you are giving up, the sublime beauty that is your birthright.”

  He held out a hand.

  “What is it you want to do?” she asked.

  “I want to let you look back in time, to let you catch a glimpse of what you could have if the Court returned.”

  “I’ve already heard about life under the Fae. It was unending human misery.”

  “Do you really think humans are any happier under their own tyranny?”

  “Yes.”

  “And does your own experience bear that out? Were you any happier before you discovered what you really are? Before you entered our world?”

  “You have a way of twisting logic,” she said.

  “You weren’t, were you? What did it feel like, suppressing all of your true urges and desires, knowing that if you gave them free rein, you’d be shunned, or imprisoned? But you were already in a sort of prison, weren’t you? Bars were only the next step. And never very far away, if you slipped, just once.”

  “But I didn’t,” she said. “I made a life for myself.”

  “You made a half life,” said the Prince. “Deny it if it makes you feel any better about your choices, but why compound the same mistakes? Do you really want to live in the human world now that you’ve had a taste of ours?”

  “I think your world is best experienced in small doses,” she said.

  “Finn MacUmhaill is not a small dose of our world. He is the most charismatic, the most purely Fae leader we have ever produced. A true chieftain, who has drawn thousands to his banner. If you don’t understand us, you will never understand him.”

  She was afraid he was right. She didn’t want him to be right. “We don’t have time for this,” she said, heading for the other end of the hall where a dark doorway beckoned.

  He grasped her wrist as she passed, swung her around, and said, “I can show you a lifetime in a second. And I will not make this offer again.”

  She hesitated. She ached to truly know Finn. The Prince saw, and he smiled in triumph. “Close your eyes.”

  She did. She felt a hand brush her cheek, his thumb sketch her jaw, and then the darkness took on shape and sound and she was seeing. With her eyes closed. There was wind in her hair and fresh air in her lungs and she was moving forward, her body one with the mount beneath her.

  For a second she wondered what she was doing on a horse. She didn’t know how to ride. But evidently she did. That wasn’t quite right, either. It wasn’t a matter of knowing. Knowledge was for Druids. Feeling was for the Fae, and she felt the power in the mare’s shoulders. She was perfectly attuned to the dip and rise of her gallop, as natural as the tide.

  She was part of everything around her. Of the earth beneath her horse’s hooves, soft and carpeted with pine needles, of the sweet leaves that canopied her way through these woods, of the branches she could anticipate as she flew past. She buried her face in the mare’s mane when one swooped low and then leaned over the side of her saddle to avoid another.

  The speed was thrilling. And they were catching up to their prey. She could hear the other riders crashing through the trees to the left and the right, the music of their laughter, their shouts, their excited cries carried on the wind.

  They broke through the trees and into a field of waving grass, and the beauty of the hunt appeared to her like the sun on a cloudy day. Her own mount was caparisoned in silver with gilt inlay, and rubies winked at her from the saddle. Ann’s hair was woven with silk ribbons that fluttered in the breeze, and it was blond, not red, but that was fine, just a discordant detail in a glittering, lovely dream.

  Because Finn was there and he had no scars. He was smiling, his hair as long as her own, his silk robes embroidered with red roses, his horse’s mane embroidered with the same ribbons th
at adorned her own blond hair.

  She could see the boar, haunches steaming, one spear already sticking out of its hide, but it was still moving, and she was glad for that because she didn’t want the hunt to end. All around her the Fianna were breaking from the trees, laughing and calling to one another, even Miach, their sorcerous guest, and his right hand, Elada.

  Brigid had never trusted Miach. She didn’t trust magic. Neither did Finn, but he had uses for it. She had none. And none for the Druids living on their land. She didn’t like the way they, particularly the head “priest,” looked at her and she did not like them around her sons.

  Miach, though, was a Druid lover. He had even brought a party of them with him on this visit, and Brigid had seen them with her own Druids. Plotting. She was sure of it.

  The boar was down, and Fion, her eldest, was butchering it with deft hands. Finn dismounted, and the rest of the band did likewise, already spreading bright cloths upon the ground.

  “Let’s go into the woods,” he said.

  “We have guests,” she reminded him.

  He bristled. “And were you thinking of admitting them to your bed?”

  “You’re the one who calls that sorcerer a friend.”

  “We’ve been friends since boyhood. It isn’t his fault that he turned out to be a sorcerer. Are you thinking of bedding him?”

  She shuddered at the thought. “A sorcerer? Never. Elada, though . . .”

  Finn sighed.

  “A joke,” she chided him. “Nothing more.” She wished sometimes that she had refused the Prince, but she had known that their sons would pay the price of the Queen’s displeasure. “I love you,” she said.

  But she said it softly, so that not even a sorcerer could hear, because the Fae understood lust and they respected desire, but they scorned love. Love led to weakness, and the leader of the Fianna could not afford to be weak. It would get back to the Queen. Everything always got back to the Queen.

  Still, she said it whenever she was sure they were out of the hearing of others. He rarely said it but he always acted on it, as he was acting on it now, casting a glance over his shoulder and pulling a blanket from the pack at her saddle, taking her hand and leading her into the trees.

  “Why is Miach really here?” she asked as the forest closed in around them.

  “We passed a clearing a mile or so back,” he said, ignoring her question.

  “I know you are keeping things from me.”

  “Court gossip,” said Finn. “You hate Court. It will only upset you. And it does not touch on our lives.”

  “Court intrigue touches everyone’s lives. Tell me.”

  “The Queen became displeased with her champion. And the perfect warrior proved himself less than perfect. Conn of the Hundred Battles insulted the Queen by spending too much time with his human mistress.”

  “The Queen should understand infatuation well enough. The Prince Consort is forever infatuated with something new.”

  “Something new she could understand, but the obsession of long duration, or at least long as regards a mortal. He’s been keeping the woman for twenty years. She is no longer young, no longer surpassingly beautiful, but still he prefers her stone hearth to the Queen’s silvered halls. And he has been hiding something there. A daughter, with all the loveliness his faded mistress once possessed, gilded by his own Fae appeal.”

  A half-blood daughter. Only a fool would love a half-blood child. But Conn of the Hundred Battles had ever been a fool. “Not so very well hidden, this daughter, if you know of her.”

  “The whole Court knows of her. And she is dead, along with her mother.”

  It was not the same thing but, still, Brigid thought of her sons, Fion and the rest. She and Finn would not be able to keep them away from Court forever. At the very least, the Queen would encounter them the next time she demanded Finn’s hospitality. Monogamy was not a Fae virtue. Variety helped to renew love over the centuries. Her own parents had separated and reunited many times through the long years, and there had been true joy in her childhood home. Finn would never have felt threatened by some young member of the Fianna. She would not have been jealous if he bedded some Court beauty when called to wait upon the Queen. It was the Prince Consort who was the problem.

  “Conn should have foreseen such an end to the affair,” said Brigid. “He should have taken better care to keep them out of the Queen’s eye.” As Brigid tried to do with her sons, with her husband, whom she loved.

  “It is done now,” said Finn. “But Miach does not think it is finished.”

  “Such things always blow over,” said Brigid. “Conn will find another woman to install in his cottage.”

  “Conn has disappeared, but not before swearing vengeance on our whole race, apparently.”

  “He is one sword,” said Brigid. “And though he is unequaled in single combat, he does not have the wit for plotting.”

  “I’m sure you’re right,” said Finn.

  “I’m always right,” she said.

  He laughed. “Only the Queen is always right.”

  “I’d rather not be compared to her,” she said.

  “But you are a queen among women,” he said. “My Brigid, my wife.”

  It was the closest he got to saying he loved her and it was close enough.

  “You ought to know better, war leader of the Fianna. A Fae can only have what he holds.”

  She took off, running, a game that they played. He would have caught her sooner, but he was wearing armor better suited for sitting a horse than racing a smaller, lighter woman, and she ran on past the clearing and all the way to the banks of the little stream.

  He used his weight to his advantage then, tackling her and knocking her to the ground. She rolled out of his reach, but he managed to catch her ankle and drag her back, and then he got hold of her hair. He used it like a rope to haul her onto her hands and knees, right where he wanted her, and she was held that way in helpless, tortured anticipation while he shed his armor.

  It was too good. It was always too good with him. Never as good with anyone else. Never as sweet, never as salt.

  Afterward he spread the blanket on the ground and pulled her into his arms. “Don’t fall asleep,” he warned her. “We have guests to entertain, and I’d rather not have them come looking for us.”

  She dozed.

  And when she opened her eyes again, she was Ann Phillips once more, and she was beneath the earth with the Prince Consort, inside that cold, damp Druid mound.

  Chapter 15

  “That was a whole afternoon,” Ann said, horrified at how long she had spent in the past.

  “It was only a second, here,” said the Prince. “Note the light in the chimney. The angle of the sun, such as it is, hasn’t changed.”

  He was right, but she still didn’t like what had happened. “Why did you show me that?” Finn, with someone else. With his wife, Brigid. She should have been jealous, but the feeling wasn’t jealousy. It was . . . sadness? She didn’t know. She had lived Brigid’s thoughts and feelings, felt Finn making love to her. The connection, the empathy, was too strong to admit jealousy.

  “You’re a berserker. Part Fae, part something the Fae respected, even envied. You’ve seen what role you might play in Finn’s world as it stands today. The same one Nancy McTeer plays. Consort, concubine, follower—if you master the fighting arts sufficiently to join the Fianna. But if the Queen came back, if the Court were restored, you could walk alongside Finn as Brigid did.”

  They were false promises, and she saw them for what they were, even if the Prince didn’t. “The return of the Court won’t fix what’s broken in Finn’s world,” she said. “And from what I’ve heard about the Queen, freeing her won’t earn you her gratitude or her love.”

  “And you think bringing this child back will earn you Finn’s?” asked the Prince
.

  “No. I think saving Davin will make it possible for us to love each other. And failing to save Davin will make it impossible for us to be together.”

  “Finn left it too late,” said the Prince. “Too late for Brigid. You think he has become human by living among them, but he never told her that he loved her. I was there when she died, in his arms, and by then he couldn’t say it, because she was bleeding out her life and they both knew it.”

  “People change.”

  “The Fae don’t.”

  She had to believe that he was wrong.

  He turned his back on her and headed for the dark doorway on the other side of the chamber.

  It was the smell that told her this part of the mound was . . . inhabited. It was a musty, unwashed odor that wrinkled her nose and made her hang back. That, and the humid warmth of the passage they were now traveling. An hour ago she would have given anything to be warm. Now, she wanted to turn around and run back the way she had come, into the damp and cold. The passage was leading them uphill again and toward the outer circumference of the mound, but the air didn’t feel clean or wholesome. Fetid was the word that came to mind.

  The Prince felt something, too, or some other sense alerted him to the presence of danger, because he handed Ann back her cell phone and drew his sword from his back. It made no sound as it slipped from the scabbard. Neither did his feet on the damp stone floor. Ann knew she couldn’t move in such perfect silence, but she gripped the knife he had given her and did her best to follow him quietly.